Playing Favorites

You bet your booties, granny. I can answer that question in precisely the length of time it takes to say "Mary Stuart Masterson." She's the 26-year-old veteran Hollywood scene-stealer you may remember best as the feisty tomboy Idgie in "Fried Green Tomatoes," and who you shortly will get to know as an emotionally disturbed young woman named Joon.

"Favorite" shouldn't be a question answered so easily. I'm honored to have made the personal acquaintance of several quite brilliant actresses-Elizabeth McGovern, Kelly McGillis, Jane Alexander. And there are, of course, all those bountiful movie stars American maledom loves to watch just moving around on the screen-Michelle Pfeiffer, Andie MacDowell, Kim Basinger, Linda Fiorentino.

But Mary Stuart (in Southern custom, she insists on being addressed by both names) is truly something special. I'm riveted every single second she's in a film frame, whether she's covered with a cloud of bees, as in "Tomatoes," or simply staring at a patch of sunlight on the floor.

And, lo, after several years of wondering if such an encounter might be possible, I found myself on a recent rainy Sunday morning having coffee and conversation with this quiet, well-mannered, utterly inimitable young lady in the top-floor suite of a New York hotel.

Mary Stuart wasn't merely great in "Green Tomatoes," she effortlessly stole that sentimental Southern epic from all her estimable fellow players, who included Oscar winners Jessica Tandy and Kathy Bates.

The film went on to make more than $100 million ("A hundred and fifty million, thank you very much," she quickly corrected), and remains a big stock attraction in video stores.

Going by the books, "Green Tomatoes" should have made her a superstar. But Hollywood's ways are mysterious, and often disappointing.

"I haven't seen any evidence of it," Mary Stuart said. "Maybe I could make a little more money, but that would mean I'd have to have a job, and I haven't really been able to come up with anything."

Unlike most movieland personages, Mary Stuart is being much too self-effacing (she has, don't you know, this most disconcerting bent for honesty).

She has just now, in fact, two new pictures: MGM's "Benny & Joon," a love story about three people in deep emotional trouble which opens nationwide this weekend, and Orion's comically connubial "Married To It," which opened last month and which she handily steals from co-stars Cybill Shepherd, Beau Bridges, Stockard Channing and Ron Silver.

The latest releases

In "Benny & Joon," which also stars Johnny Depp and Aidan Quinn, Mary Stuart memorably presents a character who is both a charming, irresistibly huggable love interest and a dangerously violent schizophrenic. I'm neither critic nor psychiatrist, but I haven't seen a deeper, more sensitive and more human portrayal of insanity since Joanne Woodward's "The Three Faces of Eve" back in the 1950s.

"Married To It," frankly, is a mildly beguiling bit of Hollywood sap about three New York couples looking desperately for ways to get their marriages off the rocks. Mary Stuart, as usual, provides the chief reason for taking in this mall multiplex special-playing the frustrated, unhappy young bride of a workaholic yuppie investment banker (Robert Sean Leonard).

The role and situation are almost cliches of our times (and analogous to her own, alas), but she brings her character so indelibly and sympathetically to life that you actually root for her to make things work with the drip.

"It's not my favorite picture," Mary Stuart said.

But she makes "Benny & Joon" very special indeed. If they had cast someone more enchanting than Johnny Depp as the Buster Keatonesque dyslexic clown in the film, they might have had a screen classic.

Typically, Mary Stuart has nothing but kind words for both Depp and Quinn.

"They were so amazingly great," she said. "I miss them on a daily basis."

`Who is that girl?'

She had her screen debut at age 7 in "The Stepford Wives" and went on to shine in "Heaven Help Us," "At Close Range" (with Sean Penn), "Immediate Family" (with James Woods and Glenn Close) and "Some Kind of Wonderful" (with Eric Stoltz), among other films. You may also remember her as the tragedy-struck girlfriend in "Gardens of Stone."

I first took note of her in the otherwise silly Gene Wilder comedy "Funny About Love," and not just because, in one scene, she jumps up and down on a bed topless.

"Who is that girl?" I found myself exclaiming.

She's the daughter of Broadway actress Carlin Glynn, who won a Tony as the madam in "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas," and actor/writer/director Peter Masterson, who co-wrote and directed the same play.